>We build our living spaces against the constraints of the human form, but that still doesn't imply the human form is optimal for anything.
We build just about everything we expect to interact with against the constraints of the human form, not just living spaces. And yes we because we built those spaces for the human body, the human body is by definition the optimal choice.
>There's no reason a robot traveling over smooth surface should have legs instead of wheels or treads.
There's a reason. The robot becomes useless for any surface that isn't smooth. What's it going to do about stairs ? You're not going to make a bespoke solution that generalizes for us better than 'feet that work'. Do you think it's better to built a million different complex robot bodies for every situation ? That defeats the purpose of being general purpose.
When we built self-driving cars, did we put a humanoid robot in the driver's seat? No. We put sensors on the car's perimeter and plugged in to the existing electronics. Forget "fits in human spaces" and think about an actual task you'd trust a robot to do for you before it's battery runs out. And who says you need one generalist? I have 5 different automated kitchen machines right now and they are all various types of rectangular prisms. I have a robot floor cleaner and it's a disc on wheels. I'd sooner have a kitchen robot that's on a rail bolted to the ceiling and connected to mains power.
This is a terribly contrived demo and not really realistic, but it illustrates my point. It's a bathroom-cleaning robot and it's kinda what I described. R2D2 with arms coming out of it's head. It's roughly human-scaled, but not at all humanoid.
We build just about everything we expect to interact with against the constraints of the human form, not just living spaces. And yes we because we built those spaces for the human body, the human body is by definition the optimal choice.
>There's no reason a robot traveling over smooth surface should have legs instead of wheels or treads.
There's a reason. The robot becomes useless for any surface that isn't smooth. What's it going to do about stairs ? You're not going to make a bespoke solution that generalizes for us better than 'feet that work'. Do you think it's better to built a million different complex robot bodies for every situation ? That defeats the purpose of being general purpose.